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Successful Email Marketing

Jen Gwinnutt of iWeb tells us how to achieve everything you want from your email campaign.

When it comes to undertaking a clear and structured approach to an email marketing campaign that works for your business, it can seem daunting. But don’t let yourself be put off to the point that you abandon email marketing all together, it’s important that you stay visible to your customers!

Insightful feedback, customer satisfaction and increased brand identity are all things than can be achieved through fun and focused email marketing. We asked expert Jen Gwinnutt, digital marketing assistant at iWeb, a leading UK based eCommerce Agency, to put together a guide to help you achieve everything you can from your campaign!

1. EMAIL SEGMENTATION

The whole point of segmentation is to provide more relevant content to your email recipients. There are many creative ways you can segment your email list to run innovative and effective campaigns that customers will enjoy.

It’s incredibly important to your business, as according to Mailchimp, segmented campaigns performed 14.31% higher than non-segmented campaign.

There are many different ways that your business could approach segmentation, here are a few:

• Demographics: age, gender, company position, income level

• Survey & Quiz results: Sending a survey gives you the opportunity to not only get that valuable demographic information, but also insights into individual tastes, preferences, and beliefs
• Geographic area: There are a lot of different ways to use geographic location data, making segmentation by geographic area a valuable tool – especially for businesses where location greatly influences purchasing decisions
• Past Purchases: The easiest way is to start sending out email recommendations for similar items or accessories that would go well with their previous purchase
• Amount spent: Use customer expense history to determine which customers are likely to buy more expensive items and which are more interested in affordable, low price items
• Website behaviour: You can send emails to people based on pages people visited, pages they didn’t visit, people who visited one page but missed another related page and What videos they watched (and how long they watched them)

2. ENGAGING COPY

Content can make or break your email marketing campaign. It’s important to produce fun, snappy and engaging emails that ensure your reader is going to keep on clicking time after time, as well as something that speaks in the tone of your brand. Here are some tips:

It’s all well and good if you’re creating engaging and exciting email marketing campaigns, but if no one can access your awe-inspiring emails on-the-go, then what’s the point? It’s time to optimise your emails for multiple device use, as according to Hubspot 48% of all emails are now opened on mobile devices, here’s what you can do:

1. Reduce image file size: Mobile download speeds have been ramping up each year, but if your images chunky, they're still going to load more slowly on mobile devices than on desktops -- and in mobile, lack of speed kills
2. Increase the size of links and call-to-action buttons: it's definitely harder to be precise with your finger than with a cursor. So make sure you don't let mobile device users experience a case of the bad touch. Make your links bigger and space your links far enough from each other that there isn't any accidental clicking.
3. Responsive Email Templates: sometimes doing this can beyond a person's skillset or bandwidth. However, the most economical solution is to just license or buy email templates from the people who do it best so you don't lose valuable opportunities over something as simple as unresponsive emails!

4. CART ABANDONMENT EMAILS

We all need a little reminder sometimes and often in the online world this can be the difference between a consumer checking out or completely forgetting they went shopping in the first place. Creating a unique cart recovery strategy is crucial, here’s how you can:

• Snappy, standout subject line: for example ‘’Warning: Unattended items in your bag’’ / ‘’oops, we caught you looking’’ - something along those lines usually works.
• Optimise subject lines for mobile, keep them short, between 30 characters and 4-7 words. Check out the Mailchimp article on this.
• Send a series of reminder emails: a series of 3 emails be sent at predetermined time intervals. The first email, triggered within an hour, could be a gentle nudge reminding customers they’ve left something in their cart.

5. MAKE THE 'UNSUBSCRIBE' OPTION CLEARLY VISIBLE

For some customers there’s nothing worse than being roped into something and then not knowing how to get out of it. This is much the same for the world of email subscriptions, so making your unsubscribe button clearly visible to your consumer is important.

It ensures that the consumer feels empowered and in control when they’re interacting with your brand and that they can choose when and if they want to view your content.

6. CROSS-CHANNEL EXTRAS

In your email correspondence it’s important that you include links to your social channels, company blog or even an app you want your customers to engage with.

Cross-channel interaction between social media in particular, is vitally important to your business, as the more interaction you’re having with your consumer base on different platforms, the more you’re likely to get you brand message across and connect with consumers. Facebook is still the number one referral traffic source for websites and emails are no different.

7. FEEDBACK REQUEST FORMS

1. Make the survey simple:
2. Personalise it: use personalisation to directly address your customers, this will help make them feel the email was sent directly to them and you are interested specifically in their feedback, and increase the chances you’ll get a response
3. Include a clear call to action: Whichever method you choose to receive your feedback, make sure to include a very clear call to action in the email so that the person knows precisely what the next step is. This could be a prominent button or link to your survey
4.Tell your customers why you want feedback: keeping your consumers in the loop and by letting them know their input is important our your business is more likely to result in great survey conversions.

IN SUMMARY

Acknowledging just some of the tips in this guide are sure to help improve your email marketing efforts. Knowing the type of audience you want to target and what you want you gain from your email marketing can be useful questions to ask yourself before you develop a campaign, to help give yourself the necessary focus you need to flourish.

ABOUT iWEB

iWeb are certified Magento developers with over twenty-two years experience designing and developing eCommerce websites that deliver results for the likes of British Heart Foundation, Raleigh Bikes and Brand Outlet.